Earlier quoted context omitted.
Didn't they launch a remake of gw1 recently. Maybe I can get my kids hooked on that instead of this Roblox crap.
For what it's worth, Roblox is how I discovered code at age 10.
10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips
181–190 of 495 posts
Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not even ECC price/availability that bothers me so much, it's that getting CPUs and motherboards that support ECC is non-trivial outside of the server space. The whole consumer class ecosystem is kind of shitty. At least AMD allows consumer class CPUs to kinda sorta use ECC, unlike Intel's approach where only the prosumer/workstation stuff gets ECC.
I've been honestly amazed people actually buy stuff that's not "workstation" gear given IME how much more reliably and consistently it works, but I guess even a generation or two used can be expensive.
Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips
#183But I don’t really know what the Firefox team does with crash reports and in making Firefox almost crash proof.
I have been using it at work on Windows and for the last several years it always crashes on exit. I have religiously submitted every crash report. I even visit the “about:crashes” page to see if there are any unsubmitted ones and submit them. Occasionally I’ll click on the bugzilla link for a crash, only to see hardly any action or updates on those for months (or longer).
Granted that I have a small bunch of extensions (all WebExtensions), but this crash-on-exit happens due to many different causes, as seen in the crash reports. I’m too loathe to troubleshoot with disabling all extensions and then trying it one by one. Why should an extension even cause a crash, especially when its a WebExtension (unlike the older XUL extensions that had a deeper integration into the browser)? It seems like there are fundamental issues within Firefox that make it crash prone.
I can make Firefox not crash if I have a single window with a few tabs. That use case is anyway served by Edge and Chrome. The main reasons I use Firefox, apart from some ideological ones, are that it’s always been much better at handling multiple windows and tons of tabs and its extensibility (Manifest V2 FTW).
I would sincerely appreciate Firefox not crashing as often for me.
Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
ECC are traditionally slower, quite more complex, and they dont completely eliminate the problem (most memories correct 1 bit per word and detect 2 bits per word). They make sense when environmental factors such as flaky power, temperature or RF interference can be easily discarded - such as a server room. But yeah, I agree with you, as ECC solves like 99% of the cases.
ECC are "slower" because they are bought by smart people who expect their memory to load the stored value, rather than children who demand racing stripes on the DIMMs.
Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
For what it's worth, Roblox is how I discovered code at age 10.
How do you mean? Is there programming inside the game (ala Minecraft or Factorio)?
I also was introduced to programming through Roblox.
Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips
#186> In other words up to 10% of all the crashes Firefox users see are not software bugs, they're caused by hardware defects! Bold claim. From my gut feeling this must be incorrect; I don't seem to get the same amount of crashes using chromium-based browsers such as thorium.
Are people getting so many FF crashes? Mine rarely does. I leave it running, opening and closing tabs, for weeks on end.
Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips
#187I've told this story before on HN, but my biz partner at ArenaNet, Mike O'Brien (creator of battle.net) wrote a system in Guild Wars circa 2004 that detected bitflips as part of our bug triage process, because we'd regularly get bug reports from game clients that made no sense. Every frame (i.e. ~60FPS) Guild Wars would allocate random memory, run math-heavy computations, and compare the results with a table of known…
GW1 was my childhood. The MMO with no monthly fees appealed to my Mom and I met friends for years. The 8 skill build system was genius, as was the cut scenes featuring your player character. If there's ever a 3rd game I would love to see something allowing for more expression through build creation though I could see how that's hard to balance.
Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips
#188Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
I haven't seen a single firefox or chrome crash in months now, you should really stress-test your hardware.
firefox crashes... decently often for me, but it's usually pretty clear what the cause is [having a bunch of other programs open]. every time i can recall my computer bluescreening [in the last year~, since that's how long ive had it] it was because of firefox tho. this may have something to do with the fact that my laptop is from 2017, however.
Re: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips
#190Very interesting. The Go toolchain has an (off by default) telemetry system. For Go 1.23, I added the runtime.SetCrashOutput function and used it to gather field reports containing stack traces for crashes in any running goroutine. Since we enabled it over a year ago in gopls, our LSP server, we have discovered hundreds of bugs. Even with only about 1 in 1000 users enabling telemetry, it has been an invaluable source…
I never dug too deeply but the app is still running on some out of support iPads so maybe it's random bit flips.